


A Bloody Meeting

by AQA473



Series: KataRaka Collection [1]
Category: League of Legends
Genre: F/F, Pre-Slash, new lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 02:57:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20351245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AQA473/pseuds/AQA473
Summary: Vastayans ambush a Noxian raiding party and no one wins. Left dying in a pool of her own blood, Katarina is visited by a very peculiar soul.





	A Bloody Meeting

**Author's Note:**

> No romance here, but consider this a sort of prequel to many of my future Kataraka stories. This will serve as a foundation and will help me depart from the old pre-2014 lore I'm so used to. I had a lot of fun writing this and I hope it's enjoyable to read, too.

Typical, filthy animals. They didn’t know when to quit.

Everything was calm, jovial, almost, as the war party made their way to the shore. Only an hour more and they’d take their ships to the outskirts of Ionia. But these feathered freaks, these hairy harriers didn’t know when to quit.

A soldier, Derek, a good man, took an arrow in his chest. He was dead before he hit the ground. Shouts, screams, weapons drawn with practice and precision. Bloodlust. Darius lead the men to their boats, turned them over, and used them for cover. Not exactly Katarina’s style.

She left the shoddy ass shelter and dove directly for the animals’ frontline. Some allied runners, charging with daggers and short swords, fell around her, but she didn’t miss a beat. A wuick dash and she was on top of them.

Two, five, seven archers fell into bloody heaps. A blast of blue energy splashed across her and she faltered, cut in the arm, but she kept moving. Ten, broken ribs. Twelve, shattered knee cap. Eleven, snapped fingers. Thirteen, a spear to the chest.

She crumpled in a pool of blood. But she did her duty. Darius’s line charged over her body, breaking their enemies’ formation.

Darius cried out, but his words were a muddled mess to Katarina’s jumbled mind. Light ebbed away as her forces vanished over the hills. Injured and dying lay among corpses, scrambling for aid.

Katarina flips to her back, coughing a sizable amount of blood. It dribbles down her chin and neck in an unsteady stream. A woman to her left gurgles her last breath, coughing red onto the soaked earth.

Deep breath--shit. A cough and a sharp pain in her chest stop that. Short rasps it is, then. She can’t even clutch her wound, her arms so damaged.

A man stands in her periphery, barely more than a blur in her faltering vision.

“ _ Arigato _ ,” he says, bowing. She can’t see who he bows to. He rushes to aid his brethren, assuming.

A few minutes go by, more seemingly uninjured soldiers standing as if by magic. Then, as Katarina’s life fades, a figure appears overhead. Gazing down at her, made clear by proximity, is a woman of lilac skin, simple cloth garments, and a single yellow horn, crooked, protruding from her forehead. Katarina vaguely recalls stories of a similar figure from her childhood, but her mind’s too much a mess to think about it now. If ever again.

Her eyes narrow as the figure reaches down, hand outstretched.

“ _ Daijoubu desu ka? _ ” Her mouth forms the word with difficulty, as if she doesn’t speak the Ionian’s filthy language regularly. But she’s still speaking it.

“Fuck o--” Katarina’s retort is cut off by a fit of coughs leading to wracking pain in her body.

Before she can object further, two hands touch her chest, gingerly, almost lovingly. She tries to fight them off, but the pain’s too great. Her body fails her. And suddenly, she can breathe. She intakes a deep, near painless breath, then another. And then it hurts again.

“Ow--shit.” Katarina shuts her eyes.

A gentle hand, warm to the touch, presses against her forehead.

“I’m sorry. You need to cooperate with me. Let me heal you.” The same voice as before, probably miss purple-skin, a vile fucking vastaya, but she’s speaking common now.

“Fuck off,” Katarina finally manages to say. She grins at her small victory.

“I only managed to fix your ribs and stop some of the internal bleeding. If you want to survive, you  _ need _ to let me heal you. Please.” Her hand’s still caressing Katarina’s sweaty, feverish forehead. A thumb drags over her knit brow.

“Why… why are you helping me? Aren’t you with  _ them _ ?”

She opens her eyes again. The woman’s smiling at her. It’s the kindest, most genuine smile Katarina’s ever seen in her life. For a second, she sees her mother’s face, looking down at her after a long embrace.

“I’m not with anyone. I help those in need. And, right now, you’re in need. And you have a bright, brilliant future I want to protect, desperately. So, please, let me help you. I don’t want you to die here.”

Katarina’s not a fool. She can feel her lungs filling with blood again. Her limbs hurt so bad she can’t move. Everything aches and the blurs of her vision creep in again like tendrils from the Void. Damn all the luck.

She grits her teeth. She nods.

Almost immediately, she feels the soothing from before enter her muscles. Fractured bones, cut tendon, open wounds, all mend and repair under this mysterious healer’s magical touch.  _ So much like mother _ . With every second, her body grows stronger. But, oddly enough, it feels like her healer’s touch becomes weaker, straining more and more with every passing moment. Her violet skin turns pale, sweat beads on her brow, she stoops to her knees and heals with one hand, using the other to support her own likely frail weight.

She gasps, falling back into the blood-red mud. She pants as Katarina sits up.

Fingers working fine, sight and touch seem alright. It smells awful. Breathing no longer hurts. She pops her shoulders and winces. Okay, still not in the best of shape, but she’s not dying. So she won’t join the annals of Noxian history today. She almost sighs with disappointment.

She turns to her savior, still breathing heavily in a pile of bodies. There’s a lot less bodies around than Katarina remembers there being.

“Are you… okay… now?” Color slowly returns to her face, but her chest heaves with each deep breath.

Katarina rolls her wrists, nodding. “Yeah, yeah. I think I’m good. Um… thanks.” She sighs. “But I don’t know why you did it. You know I have to kill those vastayans you saved, right? I can’t let them leave.”

The figure only smiled sadly at her. “I can’t stop you. You must make your own decisions, and now you are free to do so. Don’t make any decisions you’ll regret.” She falls back, resting against a rotting corpse. She shuts her eyes, breathing rhythmically.

Katarina grabs her blades, carved with the symbols of her home, and stands straight. Many wounded still litter the hillside and she can hear distant battle towards the shoreline. Time for cleanup.

She approaches a vastayn, crippled by severed hamstrings and dragging herself through the mud. Blood covers her entire body, and it’s impossible to tell how much is hers.

Katarina sheathes one of her blades and raises the other, stopping right in front of the wounded woman.

She looks up, nothing but fear in her eyes. She mumbles something unintelligible in her native tongue, but does nothing to stop Katarina.

Katarina grips her hilt, gritting her teeth. She  _ has _ to do this. She ran into the line and they nearly killed her. They started this, she’s just finishing it. As is her duty. Duty to her people, to her country, to her father…

She feels eyes burrowing into her back. Her grip falters. Another deep, beleaguered sigh.

She stows her second blade and goes to aid wounded Noxians. Somewhere, she feels someone smiling at her.


End file.
